Young sauropods were primary food source for Jurassic predators, study finds

One hundred and fifty million years ago, the largest animals ever to walk the land began life as something far more humble — unguarded hatchlings, easy prey for the era's great carnivores. A UCL-led study of fossils from the Morrison Formation reveals that juvenile sauropods, not the towering adults we imagine, formed the dietary backbone of Late Jurassic predators like Allosaurus. In the long arithmetic of deep time, vulnerability and abundance balanced each other: sauropods survived as species precisely because they reproduced so relentlessly, even as individuals perished so young.